State pollution board orders Chicago River cleanup

By Michael Hawthorne | Tribune reporterJune 02, 2011

The Illinois Pollution Control Board today took the first step toward designating stretches of the Chicago River, Cal-Sag Channel and Little Calumet River safe for “primary contact,” a legal term that includes activities such as kayaking, canoeing, boating, wading and swimming.

The rule-making panel’s 58-page order reflects a May 11 letter from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that demanded the changes, citing provisions in the 1972 Clean Water Act that require all of the nation’s lakes and rivers to eventually be safe enough for “recreation in and on the water.”

Few people think the waterways will ever become swimming attractions, but the panel’s order would make them safer for people who can ingest large amounts of bacteria while plying the waters.

The order from the obscure but powerful state board came as the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, the taxpayer-funded agency that handles Cook County’s sewage and rainwater, fiercely debated whether it’s necessary to make the river safer for recreation. The board’s action makes it clear that the MWRD doesn’t have a choice in the matter.

As a result, two of the Chicago-area's massive sewage-treatment plants will need to be overhauled to disinfect partially treated human and industrial waste that churns endlessly into the waterways, a project the EPA estimates would cost up to $72 million. Combined with money needed to complete a separate project to reduce sewage overflows into the river and Lake Michigan, the initiatives would cost an average Cook County homeowner less than $7 a month if local taxpayers alone picked up the tab, the EPA concluded after analyzing district financial data.

Chicago is the only major U.S. city that skips an important germ-killing step during sewage treatment. Most of the water in the Chicago River comes from local sewage plants, and until now the waterways have been exempt from the toughest provisions of the Clean Water Act, largely because it was assumed that people wouldn't want to come near the fetid water. But with strong encouragement from local officials, the waterways increasingly are seen as a sort of “second lakefront” rather than industrialized sewage canals.